IN FOCUS: What happens when you contact a bank or telco customer care centre?

SINGAPORE: Many of us have experienced it.
On hold for the third or fourth time trying to resolve an issue with your phone bill? Or did the automated customer service end your call because you did not select one of their preset options in time when contacting your bank? And when you do get through to an agent, was your query dealt with?
According to a report by American software company ServiceNow, Singaporeans spent more than 30 million hours on hold with customer service last year.
The inaugural study, which surveyed 1,030 Singaporeans aged 18 and above earlier this year, found that the average person in Singapore spent 16.1 hours – approximately two full working days – on hold last year. This worked out to an estimated S$1.24 billion in wages lost due to slow and poor service. 
It found that 60 per cent of customers are frustrated at having to repeat their issues to multiple people, while 53 per cent are frustrated at being transferred to multiple people and departments. 
42 per cent of customers cited waiting on hold as a driver of poor experience and 39 per cent said they were frustrated at waiting for someone to get back.
Among targets of frustration are local telecommunication companies and banks, with some people taking to social media to complain about their customer service.  
Associate Professor Sarah Cheah from NUS Business School’s department of management and organisation said the two industries can be subjected to more criticism due to their frequent contact with customers and the nature of calls.
“For banks and telcos, generally, customers are directed to make such calls when they encounter an issue,” she said. “These are more for incident reporting as well as problem reporting.”
“So when customers contact these agents, they are really quite unhappy because they are facing an issue that needs to be solved quite urgently.
“The nature of the call, the expectation from the call as well as the high volume of calls may also (result) in a certain wait time so that can actually translate into a satisfaction rating that tends to be lower than other (sectors).”
So what are customer service standard like in these industries and have they slipped, as some people claim? To find out, CNA went behind the scenes to find out what is driving the complaints and what they are doing about it.
When CNA visited UOB’s contact centre last week, it was bustling with activity.
Dozens of customer service officers were on the phone, speaking to callers while others chatted online with customers.
The sound of their voices and the clacking of keyboards filled the room. Above their heads, a screen showed the total number of calls the centre had received as well as the average time taken to respond to them.
According to UOB, its incident command centre monitors the volume of customer inquiries via its customer hotline, live chat service and email as well as the number of customer service officers available in real time. 
Calls are assigned based on the topic as well as the availability of the customer service officer. This means that the system will assign a call to the officer who has been available for the longest, to ensure that the workload is evenly distributed.
In the event of a spike in customers’ calls, the bank’s head of group technology and operations Lawrence Goh said they have established protocols in place including deploying additional customer service officers to assist with the higher call volume. 
For customer service officer Ajaypal Singh, who had answered more than 20 calls since he started his shift three hours earlier, this was considered a “manageable” day.
On average, he handles between 30 to 40 calls per day, which is equivalent to one call every 12-15 minutes. On busy days, this can spike to 60 calls per shift.
“It does happen where we are always on our seat and it’s back-to-back calls,” he said.
“It is important to watch out for things like burnout, so I do actually speak to my friends and ask ‘are you okay? Do you need a break?’ So we take turns in that sense, and once we do … we are able to better manage the call flow.”
Then there are times when customers get agitated, and he has to manage their emotions while trying to resolve their problem.  
“Customer service abuse does happen … every now and then, but not too frequently,” said the 25-year-old, adding that some customers might hurl vulgarities.
“Instead of focusing on the customer’s abuse and then trying to fight back, (I) will always try to identify the root cause of the problem, which is what (I’m) trained to do.
“I will always remember not to take it to heart and that it is nothing personal. It’s more towards the customer just being angry at certain things that have not been done for him.”
“When I face cases like that, it’s good to take a breather.
“I would always step out from my desk for a while, drink a bit of water, then take a short walk to calm down, because the next call that I have to take, I have to meet the customer’s expectations, and I cannot go in angry or bitter.”
Other customer service agents CNA spoke to described similar situations, with some having to juggle multiple queries from customers at the same time.
“It is quite a challenge because … we have a lot of products so I will need to also handle multiple inquiries ranging from general (queries) to billing and troubleshooting,” said Ms Kong Chiau Ling, a customer care executive at Singtel who handles live chat platforms.
“It’s very important for me to stay calm and focused and really listen to the customer … to pinpoint what exactly the customer’s issue is about or his concern, so that I can address that particular issue effectively,” she said, adding that responds to about 20-25 chats per day and can be assigned up to five active chats concurrently.
“I try to put myself in the customer’s shoes so I will try to understand why the customer is being so frustrated … because my priority is to help the customer.”
Sometimes, customer service officers may have to do more checks because a customer’s issue may not be so straightforward, said OCBC’s contact centre service manager Indra Iskandar, adding that this may also result in customers becoming more frustrated.
“When customers are angry and they call in, when they present their issue to us, it’s not necessarily a clear-cut issue because at the end of the day, as a bank, we will need to do the necessary checks in order for us to determine the root cause of a problem,” he said.
“We may not necessarily be able to find (the root cause) within the first two minutes of call, we will have to discuss with the customer to find out exactly what is the ongoing issue,” he added.
While call volumes have declined over the years, most banks and telcos said they still receive high numbers of queries from customers.
DBS said its 500-strong customer service officer workforce, which is based in Singapore and comprises mostly Singaporeans, manages over 250,000 queries from customers each month. This works out to more than 3 million queries per year.
OCBC said it has received 1.4 million calls this year while Singtel, which provides various channels for customers to reach out to them including Whatsapp messaging and its customer hotline, said it handles more than three million queries from customers each year.
The number of queries may also surge during major incidents such as service disruptions, placing a greater strain on customer service resources.
“In a (mobile network) outage, you must understand that the volume and the traffic (of calls or chats) that comes to us is not five times or ten times, it’s probably 100 times more than normal,” said M1’s director of customer experience and retail Stamford Low.
“To be able to scale up, we rely heavily on our bots, so we have an ability to update the bot with the outage information. So if you were to call us, the voicebot would be able to tell you ‘if you’re calling us because you’re facing service difficulty, our engineers are aware and they are working on it,” he said.
“So we are able to do that so that the customer doesn’t have to go and wait for a long time before they speak to an agent and then hear the same thing anyway.”
DBS said it has real-time monitoring dashboards and early warning indicators to enable its teams to rapidly ramp up resourcing to manage spikes in call volumes, while OCBC said it schedules more officers to work during peak periods such as the start of the month when they typically receive a higher number of queries about bank balances and credit card statements.
With some clients complaining that they are unable to reach a customer service officer during such situations, companies CNA spoke to said they do not avoid calls.
“‘When there is a surge in calls, we try our very best to clear as many calls as possible … we may even do a slightly higher number of calls (than usual),” said OCBC’s Mr Indra, adding that staff members from other teams might also be deployed to attend to customer calls.
With some users complaining that they are unable to reach a customer service agent during major incidents, Singtel’s deputy chief executive officer Anna Yip said there could be delays due to a surge in calls.
“When incidents happen … it’s not just the (customer service) agents’ role, it’s actually a whole team that crosses many departments like networks, customer agents, marketing is also involved,” she said.
“It’s basically like a war room situation … because we don’t want to give customers wrong information. We want them to … know that they’re being taken care of, but we also need to give them correct information whenever we can, because if we really don’t know what’s going on, we can’t lie.”
“So that’s why the coordination is very, very tight, and it’s not just about the front-end messaging, but all the way to the back, those people who are fixing things and turning things around, giving us the update. We need to keep it in one team.”
“We don’t stop any calls or … say ‘we don’t take any calls because we have nothing new to tell people’.
“It could be that, in the very, very rare situation where we do have a call surge, then of course, there is a bit of delay for people to come through, but we never stop communication, and we certainly never stop people from contacting us at all.”
With consumers becoming more digitally savvy, this could have also resulted in higher expectations of customer service, according to Assoc Prof Cheah.
“Just a few years back, studies showed that consumers were still alright if they had to wait a little while for their issue to be resolved,” she said.
“But today, a lot of people cannot tolerate even a refresh of the screen which takes more than one minute or a call that is not handled within ten minutes.
“It’s the digital age that we’re living in, where a lot of information is being provided very quickly, so … to a certain extent, we are being conditioned to expect a fast response.”
To keep up with rising expectations, OCBC said it has implemented several internal processes to help to shorten its customer service officers’ average handling time.
This includes allowing its customer service executives to approve loan waiver requests immediately provided certain criteria are met, as well as processing credit card transaction disputes.
Previously, they were not able to do this and had to raise such requests to another team to process.
Its efforts appear to be working with the bank now hitting its target of picking up 80 per cent of calls within 60 seconds.
In comparison, it picked up 40 to 50 per cent of calls within the target last year.
“Last year, when I took on (this new role), we obviously had quite a fair bit of catch up, but ever since we normalized the situation beginning of this year, we’ve been using data to teach ourselves how to be more proactive,” said OCBC’s head of service channels and transformation Dennis Lee.
“(We) want to be proactive, to (be able to) tell customers that the moment they face an issue, we (already) know and before they call us, we are able to educate them on how to self-help so that they can resolve an issue … without having to call us or wait on the phone.”
The bank is currently pilot testing push notifications that explain why payment has failed when a customer’s card is rejected as well as free web call service for customers who experience credit card issues while overseas.
This was a solution it came up with after noticing that enquiries about account balances as well as credit card issues accounted for the highest numbers of calls.
“What I’m trying to do is whenever they tap at a failed transaction straightaway, we will detect why their transactions were rejected … so we’re trying to proactively inform customers … and this is where they can go and self-help immediately,” said OCBC’s Mr Lee.
Singtel has implemented self-help tools for common issues so that customers can resolve them on their own quickly.
For instance, its mobile app has a function that allows customers to test their network signal to see if it is working normally. If it is weaker than usual, the app will then provide the user with advice such as restarting the device to refresh the system.
“The best customer journey is … (when the customers) don’t have any need to contact us at all,” said Singtel’s Ms Yip.
“Every year, the call volume or contact volume needs to come down,” she said, adding that this is a key performance indicator for her team.
To date, Singtel said it can resolve three quarters of the queries and complaints it receives on the same day. For the remaining 25 per cent, the telco said it strives to resolve them within two days.
Given the perennial labour crunch as well as rising expectations of consumers demanding almost-instantaneous service resolution, it is inevitable that companies move towards chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI), said Assoc Prof Cheah.
“Even in the absence of AI tools, in the past, you would have help desks where a human agent does the initial screening of the call to see whether it is something that can be resolved (easily) or something that has to be directed to a second level or third level service agent,” she said, likening it to a triage process.
“The chatbot, basically, is replacing that human help desk, which can be quite heavily overloaded and training a human help desk agent can be very onerous and very time-consuming for companies (because) it takes time for them to be trained to handle all sorts of inquiries and incident reporting.”
Indeed, chatbots have become a fixture in customer support for many of the banks and telcos CNA spoke to.
M1 said 90 per cent of the queries it receives from customers on its live chat platform can be handled by its chatbot while DBS said it has observed that customers increasingly prefer to resolve routine enquiries through its digital channels which includes chatbots.
“(Our chatbot receives) about 100,000 unique chats per month … so it actually handles on its own 90 per cent (of this) so that our agents don’t end up having to handle the full load of live chat,” said M1’s Mr Low.
“Our chatbot is completely autonomous. However, every day, every minute, (a human staff) is observing her, so the supervisor is able to see her conversations and then correct them for future conversations if it’s not right. So this constant learning, constant tweaking, constant making her better and better.”
OCBC, which mainly responds to customer service queries via counter service, secured email or its phone hotline, said it is looking at using chatbots in the future. 
“It’s already part of our plan, in fact, we’ve been exploring this solution over the last one year or so,” said OCBC’s Mr Lee, adding that the bank has been studying how to implement this.
“You want to start with a chatbot that’s able to deal with … most of the queries first, but in a situation where the chatbot is not able to resolve (this), then you want it to filter down to a live chat, where you have a human agent at the back really servicing the client, but through typing.
“If the live chat is still not able to resolve customer issues, then it needs to be channelled into a call where (the customer service executive) has to pick up the phone and talk to the customer on the spot, which are typically complex calls.
“If you just build a live chat without connection to these, it may not seem like a complete experience and it may end up probably creating more issues and problems, so this is what we’ve been trying to explore and that’s why it’s taking us a bit of time.”
DBS and UOB have also started using generative AI to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as doing live searches on the bank’s knowledge base to quickly retrieve query-specific information.
According to DBS’ group head of operations Jimmy Ng, this is expected to reduce call handling time by up to 20 per cent.
While such tools can improve efficiency and free up humans to focus on more high-value or complex tasks, Assoc Prof Cheah said it is crucial to ensure that they are being leveraged effectively.
“Customers are actually quite agnostic to tools that the company uses,” said Assoc Prof Cheah.
“Ultimately when it comes to customer service, all customers care about is that the company gets the job done when they encounter any difficulty, or if they are interested in making a sale or purchasing something, they want convenience and they want a reliable service.
“Even if companies implement chatbots and AI technology, they should implement it in such a way that they really allow them to achieve efficiency, which means freeing up the human agents to do more important stuff, and not creating more work for the human agents, which could result in a slip in customer service standards.
“The chatbots also have to know their own limitations and not to keep going even when they are unable to meet the customers’ needs. So, the prioritization for human interaction for complex issues must be seamless from the customer’s point of view,” she added.
Ultimately, companies must ensure that their customer service meets their clients’ expectations or there could be serious repercussions, said Assoc Prof Cheah.
“If customer standards fall below a certain standard, then their relationship with the customer, and that transaction with the customer is at risk,” she said.
“And it’s not just the existing transactions or relationships but future relationships and transactions as well as the opportunity for referral and future business opportunities will be at risk,” she added.
Based on internal customer surveys as well as net promoter scores – a metric that measures customer loyalty by looking at their likelihood of recommending a given business – companies CNA spoke to said it seems like most customers are satisfied with their service.
OCBC said its customer satisfaction score – measured through internal surveys conducted by the bank – increased from 3.5 out of five last year, to 4.5 this year while M1 said its net promoter score increased by 30 per cent.
“This year, to date, complaints actually dropped by about 10 to 15 per cent compared to the same period last year,” said OCBC’s Mr Lee, adding that the turnaround time to resolve complaints has also decreased.
Quarterly statistics published by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) also show that the number of complaints about mobile and broadband services that M1 and Singtel received in the second quarter of this year (Apr-Jun) remained low with one or fewer complaints per 10,000 subscribers.
However, the companies acknowledged that there is still room for improvement.
“We’ve got a team that also handles … escalated complaints or feedback because we really want to get down to what was so unique about that particular one that made it such a bad experience,” said M1’s Mr Low.
“Looking at the verbatims, having focus groups, looking at our Net Promoter Score results gives us insights into where … customers are still having problems of (if) the way that we communicate in an SMS causes anxiety to the customer.
“This is a continuous process, where, from many years ago, we are always evaluating it every week asking ourselves ‘how can we do better?’ and we are very serious about this”
Similarly, OCBC also recently set up a dedicated team to analyse service data to identify areas of improvement.
“We get feedback (from customers) that are both positive and negative and to us, every feedback is very valuable … because when a customer bothers to take time to give feedback to us … it’s an opportunity for us to do better,” said OCBC’s Mr Lee.
“If the customer has an immediate need to solve a problem, we will quickly reach out … and then resolve it. But internally, we’ve been using data … to (see) in general, based on this feedback given, if there are any systemic issues that we can identify on an ongoing basis?
“When there is, this is where we will invest our time and resources to prioritize, to solve this pain point for our customers and particularly so if it is affecting quite a significant number of customers, because that’s where you get the most impactful outcome and positive benefits to our customer as well.”